An Orcadian doctor, a woman whose work was discovered in the bottom drawer of a dresser and two sisters who pioneered documentary filmmaking in Scotland before their careers were cut short are among the ground-breaking female photographers celebrated in a new exhibition this month.

Glean is at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh and is curated by Glasgow School of Art Exhibitions Director Jenny Brownrigg. Promising to tell the untold story within the history of Scottish photography, it features 125 photographs and eight films by 14 women who in the early 20th century took their cameras into rural and urban communities throughout Scotland and reflected in a new way the lives of the people who lived there. Some are known, others not, but it’s the first time their work has been presented in a single exhibition.

“That’s what makes it a first. There hasn’t been this focus on bringing together these women from this period,” said Ms Brownrigg. “What makes the story different is that male contemporaries of the time were still giving quite a romantic ideal of Scotland whereas these women they were showing this change in Scotland from a traditional to a modern way of life.”

Among the photographers whose work is on display are sisters Ruby and Marion Grierson, two of eight children born to teachers and political activists Jane Anthony and Robert Grierson in a Stirlingshire mill town in the early 1900s. Their elder brother John, who made seminal 1929 film Drifters about the North Sea herring industry, is often described as the father of documentary film. He is even credited with inventing the word, in his 1926 review of Robert Flaherty’s silent film Moana.

But although it was largely through their brother’s work with the state-funded Empire Marketing Board in the late 1920s that the sisters received their first opportunities in filmmaking, their individual output is increasingly coming to be viewed as comparable to his. Ruby Grierson cut her teeth working with the celebrated General Post Office (GPO) film unit and, although she was an uncredited assistant on its 1935 film Housing Problems, she pioneered the use in it of direct-to-camera interviews. Because of that the film was considered revolutionary for the way it tackled pressing social issues. Marion worked on the same film and, like her sister, made a string of short documentary films throughout the 1930s combining extreme innovation with unflinching realism – and, in the case of 1933’s So This Is London, with a commentary by poet WH Auden.

Tragedy and circumstance cut short both women’s careers, however. Marion Grierson effectively stopped making films after she married and had children. Her sister died on September 17, 1940 when the SS City Of Benares was sunk by a German U-boat 250 miles west of Rockall in the North Atlantic.

The ship had sailed from Liverpool four days earlier carrying 406 people, many of them children emigrating to Canada. Grierson was on board to make a film about the children and the passage. Only 148 people survived, many saved only after days adrift in lifeboats. The U-boat commander, Heinrich Bleichrodt, was later tried and acquitted for war crimes. Grierson was 36 when she died.

Ms Brownrigg came across the work of Violet Banks when she saw a photocopy of one of her images in a primary school in Eigg. Other photographs came to light when an eagle-eyed antiques dealer brought a collection of her albums to a curator at Historic Environment Scotland. He had found them in the bottom drawer of an old dresser he was trying to sell. “It shows you how precarious things are,” said Ms Brownrigg. “Luckily he saw the value in the albums.”

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Another source of Banks’s work came from a photographic archive in Edinburgh Central Library originally collected by ethnographer Isabel Frances Grant, who among other accomplishments established the Highland Folk Museum. She had bought photographs from Banks and another photographer featured in the show, Margaret Fay Shaw, an American who lived for five years on South Uist where she photographed sisters Mairi and Peigi MacRae.

Dr Beatrice Garvey, meanwhile, was a doctor in North Ronaldsay, the northernmost island in the Orkneys. Over her 15 years there she photographed the community, specialising in children and babies. “It’s probably the only case where the photographer also brought the babies she’s photographing into the world.”

Other notable women in the exhibition include Glasgow-born Jenny Gilbertson, who spent a year embedded in a community in Shetland filming its rhythms and whose work greatly impressed John Grierson, and Johanna Kissling, mother of noted German émigré and photographic pioneer Werner Kissling. She photographed life in St Kilda in 1905, 20 years before her son travelled to the Western Isles to pursue his own interest in life there.

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Ms Brownrigg’s hope is that curators working across all of Scotland’s archives can draw inspiration from the exhibition and examine their own collections more closely for more work by these female photographers and the many others whose stories have yet to be told. “It’s not about doing a definitive exhibition, it’s about opening up so that other people can see the value of this work,” she said. “It needs a hive mind approach to working with the legacies of these amazing women.”

Glean: Early 20th Century Women Filmmakers And Photographers In Scotland opens on November 12 at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh